


Loki was back

by illwynd



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Cotard's Delusion, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Character Death, Pseudo-Necrophilia, Sibling Incest, Trauma, Vomiting, not actually EG compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:22:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27346537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: Loki is brought back to life after his death at Thanos' hands.The problem is, he thinks he's still dead.
Relationships: Loki/Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 125





	Loki was back

**Author's Note:**

> So here's this one for the Day of the Dead this year!
> 
> I started this fic before EG actually came out. So you’ll have to handwave various details that don’t actually match the story we got in that movie. I like my version better anyway.
> 
> Please mind the tags.

Loki was back.

The trouble was, he did not know it. The trouble was, he believed he was still dead. 

When he was first returned to Thor’s side, he had spent hours in front of the mirror, poking at his own throat with an outstretched finger. 

“I thought it would be more bruised,” he’d say, while Thor watched, a lump forming in his own. “He crushed it. I know he did. I felt it. It still feels strange. Why is it so easy to breathe now? It should not be. He crushed it.”

Eventually Thor had to pull him away, force him to stop looking, to stop poking and prodding and pulling and kneading at the pale, unmarked skin, lest he actually do himself damage that way. Thor had to wrap his arms around his brother and hold him in place until the fidgeting stopped, until the halfhearted murmurs gave way to quiet. 

The quiet never lasted. 

Loki did everything with a certain unsteadiness. Uneasiness. When others were around, he was silent, still, mute. He would sit in the corner of the room, wrapped in a dark cloak—Thor didn’t know where exactly he had gotten it, had never seen it on him before, and when Thor realized at last where he had seen such a thing in the past ( _one of the shrouds of the dead, the garment they wore for their final funereal journey, back when such ceremonies were held on Asgardian soil_ ) he had been filled with panic.

“Where did you get this?” Thor demanded, his voice high and thin, and Loki’s eyes wide and white beneath the dark drape that formed a sort of hood. He had reached out to touch it, grabbing a hem with trembling hands.

Loki clutched the cloth tighter around himself. “It’s mine. I deserve it, don’t I? I tried to save you…”

Loki wouldn’t let him take it away.

So Loki would sit like that, wrapped in his shroud, when any of the mortals or others came to visit. He sat in the dark corner, so still it was as if he meant to disappear. 

“Thor, is your brother all right?” Stark asked on one such occasion, head cocked to one side in the antechamber outside as he made ready to depart. 

Thor could only shake his head. “I fear he is not. He thinks he… he doesn’t believe he is alive.”

Stark gave him a strange look. “There are doctors who can help with that sort of thing, you know?”

“I am not sure they could help _us_ ,” Thor answered, the smile feeling tight upon his face, because he knew Stark meant well. “Even if Loki would accept the attempt.”

When they were alone again, the stillness left Loki, leaving restlessness in its stead.

“There is nothing after.”

Thor’s head whipped at the words. “What?”

Loki had taken a seat by the window, now, and he stared out at the stars. “Not what we were told, anyway. I looked for her. I tried. But it wasn’t… it wasn’t like that.”

Dread, dark and cold. 

“What _was_ it like?”

That got the first look of clarity in his brother’s eyes that he had seen there in months. Loki looked at him with such longing. And also just like his little brother, clever and close and with so many things that only the two of them shared, together against all the realms. 

“I can’t tell you. You shouldn’t know. You’re still alive, after all.”

And then the mists rolled in again while Loki stared out at the stars.

“And then there wasn’t even that. I don’t know why. But the only thing I could do was… come back here. To find you.”

“You were brought back to life. Just as all the others. Your death was undone.”

“Then why do I still feel it,” Loki murmured, without glancing his way. “Why do I still know that I died? Why does nothing feel the same?”

* * *

Thor had tried to argue that Loki was surely just shaken by his experiences. Surely, since he had died and returned before and had been fine soon afterward, this strangeness would pass now as well…

Loki frowned back at him when he said it, and the look was one of deep enough confusion that Thor stopped speaking before he could even finish. “What?”

Loki’s lips moved silently for a moment, as if he were sorting through something to himself. “I’d never died before,” he said at last.

“Loki? But… on Svartalfheim? Or when you fell from...” 

Loki shook his head, very slightly. A subtle motion, so that Thor barely caught it.

“I never died. I was… wounded. I was… everything went dark. But then I woke up again.”

“But if it all went dark, how can you be certain you did not—”

Then the oddest curve came to Loki’s lips. It barely seemed to belong there, and it did not match the hollow, horrified look in his eyes. “There is no mistaking it, when you’ve actually died.”

Thor did not try to argue with that. In fact he did his best to put it out of his mind, the thought of it too distressing. The thought returned to him in the dark of night, though, when he lay sleepless, thinking back on the times—he had believed—Loki had died before. 

The idea that in truth he hadn’t… it unsettled Thor, and he was not sure why. He squirmed, part of him wishing to get to his feet, to go pace the hallways of this space they inhabited, but feeling held back by the fact that Loki was merely on the other side of the room, in a second bed pushed into the far dark corner. Probably sleeping. Probably. But considering how he would lie there unmoving all night whether he was or not, Thor could never be sure. 

He heaved out a sigh that sent a twinge of motion through the entire bed. 

Learning that Loki had not really died at all the first two times—Thor should have felt relieved at that, shouldn’t he? But he didn’t. Instead he felt a hollow in his belly, and a restlessness in his whole body, and a desire to bury his head beneath his pillow to escape it all.

Once he had turned it on Loki as an accusation. That, because he was alive, he must have _faked_ dying. 

It wasn’t anger Thor felt now. It was something very different as echoes of those times hummed through him until he was squeezing his eyes closed, wishing he could shut out the thoughts as well.

When they faded at last, Thor turned to his side. Turned toward where his brother rested. Almost like being in their long-ago nursery that they’d shared until they grew enough to be given separate chambers. Almost like that, waking in the middle of the night and peering across the dark span of the floor to see if his brother’s eyes might be peeking out too, ready to get into some sort of mischief together. 

Almost like that. Nothing like that at all. 

He could barely see the outline of his brother’s form. A deeper shadow in a shadowy space.

Their beds may as well have had a dark veil between them. Or a dark ocean. As if they were on separate islands, or separate realms, each alone in a storm.

* * *

“Tell me what it was like,” Loki asked some time afterward. “I know you don’t want to tell me. I know it doesn’t really matter. But I want to know.”

Thor had been avoiding this topic for months, because _he_ did not want to relive it. He had wanted to push that pain away and never feel it again. 

His voice cracked when he spoke. “Which… which part do you mean?”

Loki didn’t meet his gaze. His eyes trailed, vague, across everything else but him. He looked… ashamed. Hunted. Uncertain. 

“Did you… did you mourn?”

 _Did he mourn_. 

Something spoken long ago. On a shadowy cliff on a Midgardian mountainside, under moonlight. Spoken in snide anger, then. 

_Had Thor mourned_. 

And now, Loki asked him again. Loki, who believed himself still dead, asked whether his brother had grieved when he thought he died. As if he truly did not know. As if perhaps he had not known then either, though Loki had surely seen Thor’s face as he fell. Had heard Thor’s scream. 

And twice since then, Thor had held his brother’s body in his arms and wept. 

But Loki had not known. 

The unsettled feeling started in Thor’s chest again. 

What had Loki known instead?

Thor remembered his own words that came later, washing everything else away. He felt them echoing, soft vibrations down his spine. 

He was lightheaded as he answered. 

“Yes. I mourned. But it was almost unbearable. I could not often think of it if I wanted to be of any use to anyone. I had to put it out of my mind as much as I could.”

Loki listened to this without reaction, eyes slowly blinking in that distant way that had become his since he was brought back. 

“Were there any ceremonies for me?”

“Well, you already know what happened after Svartalfheim, you were there—” Thor began. 

Loki’s lips pressed together, pale and bloodless. “What about the first time?”

Thor did not know how to explain it. There had been and there hadn’t. Everyone had been shaken. Frigga had said she did not believe it was true. And Thor had not been able to bear speaking of him yet. So they hadn’t. There had been feasting of the sort that marked such a loss. But no one had raised their glass to his name. No one had told tales of him. No one had wept over him. At least not where anyone else could see.

“Mother did not want to believe you were gone,” Thor said at last. 

Thor was not sure what reaction he expected. But Loki simply nodding, contemplative, as if this answer was no surprise to him, was not it.

Silence ruled between them, until Thor began to grow nervous.

“It’s all right,” Loki said, in a voice barely more than a whisper. “It’s all right if there weren’t.”

“It’s not that we didn’t care,” Thor protested. 

“It’s all right, Thor.”

* * *

The worst thing about their current circumstances was that there seemed no solution. 

When they were alone, when Loki was not curled up in his shroud in the corner in silence, Thor could practically feel Loki leaning toward him like a plant toward the sun. 

Yet he startled when Thor touched him. Froze and did not move. The first time Thor noticed the reaction, he quickly moved his hand away from his brother’s shoulder. He gestured, vaguely, at his own throat in apology. 

“I am sorry, I did not mean to touch too close to…”

Loki’s eyes flickered around him, never quite fixing on him, instead seeming to watch a moth flit around his head. When he spoke, it was barely a whisper. “It’s not that. I want you to touch me.”

When Thor tried again, though, the reaction was only more pronounced, the stiffening of Loki’s form. 

Barely a whisper. But a desperate, insistent one. “I _do_ want you to. I _do_. But I am dead and you are alive and I can feel how alive you are and it... “

Loki’s blank, frozen face. Wetness glistening in his eyes. 

“Would you kiss me? Even though I am dead?”

So that was how it happened. 

They had not been together like this in _years_. Thor had missed it, painfully. He had tried to banish the thought, because it would ache too badly if he actually acknowledged the loss. 

But this, this was… terrifying. Because he kissed Loki and his brother did not respond to it as he once would have. Thor only knew Loki’s reaction from the tears that continued to land on his cheeks and the soft, keening whine that escaped him now and then with his breaths. 

Otherwise, he did not move. His lips were pliant and his jaw was firm as cold clay. When Thor’s tongue invaded his mouth, Loki’s tongue merely allowed itself to be pushed aside. 

It was terrifying, mostly, because Thor could not stop himself from thinking about it. What he would do if Loki were truly dead. Whether he would do _this_ with his body. And it was terrifying because of the reaction that thought caused in him. It made him want to weep and never stop weeping. And it made him burn inside with a lust he had not known himself capable of. As if this were his last chance and he would never have such a thing again.

He could not stop himself from practically tearing Loki’s clothes from his unresisting body; he was fortunate, perhaps, that Loki had taken to wrapping himself with the shroud and only a few light garments beneath, for Thor was able to simply bare enough of his brother’s skin to feel him, able to yank down the soft trousers, push him onto his front.

Loki lay there sprawled. He did not move to reposition himself. Did not move at all. 

What would Thor do if Loki were truly dead? What had he wanted to do all the other times he believed his brother had died? What would he have done if he’d ever had Loki’s _body_ there with him after it happened? If he had ever had an hour alone with his brother’s dead form?

Thor would have made love to it, so fiercely, so fiercely, as if that alone could demand that he be returned.

Or like the farewell he had never really gotten.

Thor stared at the pale expanse of his back. Touched the white curve of his buttocks. Felt how the flesh moved under his fingers, and he could almost imagine it did not move like living flesh. He could almost imagine it was cool to his touch, unnaturally cool and still. 

He looked up to where Loki’s face was turned to the side, his eyes half closed. Unmoving. 

_Did you mourn_. 

Thor had heard, sometimes, of mourners at funerals who were taken by a frenzy. Mourners who would tear the strands of hair from their scalps. Mourners who would rend the garments from their bodies. Mourners who would beat and scratch at their own flesh, cursing it for living when their loved one was gone. 

Thor felt as if he was in such a frenzy now, only it was not turned toward his own destruction. 

It was a frenzy of a different kind, but just as consuming, just as inexorable. 

He pressed his body against his brother’s and imagined that Loki was truly dead. Remembered the feeling of holding Loki when he bled out on Svartalfheim, his own heart cracking in his chest. Remembered the feeling of screaming, until his throat went ragged, as his brother disappeared into the void. Remembered the hollow blankness that overtook him as he crawled toward his brother’s corpse amidst the ruin of the ship.

_The body beneath him was limp and cold. The heart had ceased to beat. There was no more quick mind within him. Loki was gone._

Thor wrapped his arms around him, shoved inside him, rutted furiously, and it did not even feel like pleasure. Every nerve reacted to the closeness of Loki’s body. Every nerve reacted to the feeling of being within him, in a way he had not been in years. And Loki _was_ limp beneath him. He made no sound. His eyes stared unblinking while Thor’s thrusts shifted him against the bed. 

Thor was the one who made noises, the sounds of his grieving. They were ripped from his throat, with each new wave of tears. 

He imagined rutting like this into his brother’s dead body. He imagined it was true. And he held Loki yet closer.

“I will never let death keep you,” he insisted against the back of Loki’s neck, through a rough, strained throat. Nose in the soft, dark mass of his hair. “I will _never_.”

But Loki had not even been sure he ever mourned for him. 

Loki had faced death for him. Had _died_ trying to save him. Choking and kicking and struggling, futilely. So that even now Loki felt the phantom of that crushing grip upon his throat in every moment. So that Thor could no longer even place a companionable hand upon his neck, as he so often used to do, without reminding him of it.

And Loki had not really believed Thor would care, or miss him, or wish to have him back. 

Just then he caught a glimpse of the silvery, snail’s trail line of wetness that slipped from Loki’s unblinking eye. He spotted it just before the convulsion came upon him, bowing his back, making his arms tighten around Loki’s cool, limp form. 

Fluids, hot and pulsing, pouring into his brother, and it felt nothing like it ever had before. He felt more separate from Loki than he ever had in their lives.

Everything inside Thor changed in an instant. Into horror. Into nausea. He could barely pull back and grope for a basin at the bedside before he was retching. Emptying the contents of his stomach into it. Retching and hawking and spitting away the clinging strands while he sat there on the edge of the mattress, covered in cold dampness all over, shivering. 

The bed moved behind him and Loki’s hand—spidery, the grip oddly hard—came to stroke his hair back from his sweaty brow and pat his shoulder gently. 

“I’m sorry,” Thor gasped out. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why it…”

Loki’s whispery voice soothed him. “I would be more worried if you had not reacted that way, Thor. It is only natural that it repulses you to lie with your dead brother.”

Thor shook his head, wanting to argue, but unable to pull together any words. 

By the time Thor could gather himself once again, Loki had fixed his garments and wrapped himself again in his shroud and curled up, with his knees to his chest, on a corner of the bed. 

Beyond the window, Thor could see the eternal stars. The dark night sky of this place, this realm. Not their own familiar stars. But just as cold and distant. Just as beautiful.

He sat beside his brother and opened his arms to see if Loki would embrace him willingly. 

Loki leaned closer. It was probably as much of an invitation as Thor could expect.

“You’re not dead anymore, brother,” Thor told him. 

Loki shifted against him.. “I am. I feel it.”

“You’re _not_ ,” Thor insisted. 

“I _am_.” There was a moment of quiet. “If I simply stay dead, then I don’t need to fear anything anymore.”

“What is it that you don’t wish to fear?”

Loki did not answer.

Thor held his brother as Loki began to weep. Not just steady breaths and silent tears on a motionless face. 

This was something different now.

“Whatever it is,” Thor said, almost frantic, “whatever it is, brother, I will protect you from it. I swear I will.”

Amidst the sobs that shuddered in Loki’s shoulders, Thor felt the shake of his head. 

Thor began to weep as well.


End file.
